


you're not where you belong (inside my arms)

by crackdkettle



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, M/M, Merry Christmas I wrote something depressing!, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-26
Updated: 2014-12-26
Packaged: 2018-03-03 15:18:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2855561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crackdkettle/pseuds/crackdkettle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The truth is, though he used to put on a good face for his mother and Bucky, he’s never particularly cared for this holiday.</i>
</p><p>On three different December 25ths in three different years, Peggy, Steve, and Bucky all try – and fail – to forgot it's Christmas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're not where you belong (inside my arms)

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas/winter festival of your choice! I was going to write you all a fun _While You Were Sleeping_ AU. Instead, I wrote a depressing fic because that's how I roll. Enjoy?

_1949_

Peggy isn’t sure who she’s expecting when someone pounds on her flat door at 1900 hours, but it isn’t Howard. Howard likes to mention as often as possible that they live in the same city, but they don’t, really. Howard lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and Peggy lives in Brooklyn. As far as Peggy’s concerned – certainly for as often as they see each other – they may as well live on different planets.

“Howard,” she says. “What brings you here?”

“It’s Christmas,” says Howard, tone neutral and matter-of-fact.

“Is it?” says Peggy. “I supposed I’ve just got so caught up in everything.”

“There was a big company bash last week,” says Howard. “I wanted you to be my date but you never answered my calls.”

“I haven’t been in much,” says Peggy. “I’ve been busy.”

“So have I,” says Howard.

“Socializing with the political elite?” says Peggy unkindly.

“You have your missions, I have mine,” says Howard, shrugging. That’s the wonderful, infuriating thing about Howard: he doesn’t take things personally. “But there’s nothing tonight. It’s Christmas.”

“Evil doesn’t take holidays,” says Peggy.

“Lucky we’re not evil then,” says Howard with the shadow of a grin that used to be easy.

_Aren’t we though?_ Peggy wants to say. It was easy to believe in black and white with Steve by her side. She and Howard exist only in grey spaces.

“Come on, pal,” says Howard, taking her hand. “Jarvis decorated a tree and everything. Do me a favor and don’t disappoint him, and I’ll get the old gang up here for New Year’s. It’ll be just like when we rang in ’45.”

_No it won’t,_ Peggy doesn’t say. They both know Howard’s lies aren’t meant to deceive.

“Hopefully with central heating,” she says instead, and Howard’s shadow-grin becomes a shade brighter.

“Definitely,” he says. “Now don’t make me beg, Agent Carter.”

“I’ll get my coat,” says Peggy.

Howard has a car downstairs, but it’s parked and empty. Even Stark employees get Christmas off, it seems.

They drive over the bridge and into Manhattan in silence. The streets are only slightly emptier than usual. New York doesn’t sleep even for Christmas.

Howard slows as they near Rockefeller Center and pulls over.

“You seen the tree yet?” he asks. She has, but she gets out of the car and follows him anyway.

The illuminated tree makes the square almost brighter than daylight. At the base, tourists cluster together for photographs. Peggy finds herself wondering if Steve ever came to see it – if it was maybe a tradition, something he did with his mother or Bucky that meant the Christmas season had truly begun.

She shivers.

“I know,” says Howard quietly, surprising her. “It’s not fair. He deserved better. You both did.”

“He’d have hated it here,” says Peggy, because it’s true. Steve would have imploded in this new world of blurred lines and espionage.

“Yeah, maybe,” says Howard, and Peggy knows they’re both thinking the same thing: more than Steve got buried in ice that day. They’d been so naïve, so idealistic. Nobody starts out thinking they’ll have to compromise.

“Cheer up, pal,” says Peggy, shaking off this melancholy train of thought. “It’s Christmas.”

The shadow-grin again. He puts his arm around her.

“Merry Christmas, Agent Carter.”

Peggy leans her head against his shoulder.

“Merry Christmas, Howard.”

* * *

 

_2012_

“Thanks for letting me know,” says Steve. “And next time your house is blown up, call me _before_ everyone gets kidnapped.”

“I promise,” says Pepper, her smile evident even through the phone. “But we’re all fine now so enjoy your day. Merry Christmas, Steve.”

“I–” Steve’s voice catches in his throat. “Merry Christmas, Pepper. Tell Tony I’m glad you’re all safe.”

“I will,” she says and hangs up.

Steve tosses the phone aside, pulls on a jacket, and slides down the fire escape to the dark and treacherously icy Brooklyn alleyway below. The sun still hasn’t risen. He has no gloves, so he pushes his hands deep into his pockets as he emerges onto the main sidewalk, shivering slightly since his jacket is really far too light for a New York winter. The serum didn’t make him impervious to cold, but Steve’s found that ever since he woke up, he prefers its numbing ache. He’s not sure if that’s because of the decades spent in ice or in spite of them.

_Merry Christmas, Steve._ He’d forgotten – or rather, purposefully ignored – how soon it was. The truth is, though he used to put on a good face for his mother and Bucky, he’s never particularly cared for this holiday. Each snowfall preceded a rise in traffic at the hospital, which in turn meant his mother became increasingly tired and overworked. Steve couldn’t help out, either, since he got pneumonia every November, regular as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Bucky tended to hover over Steve, fretting, every chance he could get, and he and Steve’s mother were so determined to make Christmas special for Steve that they always overstretched their bank accounts and themselves.

Christmas, as far as Steve was concerned, was just the annual reminder that his body was too small for his heart. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant sensation. The only Christmas he ever really enjoyed was the one he’d celebrated with Peggy and the Commandos during the war.

Today it’s a reminder of what he’s lost. No mother or Bucky to pretend with. No pneumonia either, but that comes at such a heavy price.

He’s read up since getting defrosted: he knows how the war ended. Peggy and the Commandos swept up the splintered remnants of Hydra, and that’s good. He just can’t help wondering sometimes, lying alone in a too-soft bed in a once-familiar neighborhood he barely recognizes, if there could have been another way. One that didn’t involve getting buried in ice. ~~One that didn’t involve waking up again.~~

They were going to win. He’d never doubted that. They were going to win, and then he, Bucky, Peggy, and Howard were going to rebuild the world together.

Only that part didn’t exactly go to plan. They were all supposed to grow old together: in the end, only one of them had grown old at all.

A pang goes through his heart at the thought of Bucky falling from a train; Howard with a car twisted around his broken body; Peggy lying in a hospital bed with only intermittent moments of lucidity.

He goes down to DC to visit her every couple week. Half the time he spends the entire visit explaining to her how he’s alive. Once she didn’t recognize him at all. But when she smiles or laughs – when he can get a few minutes of real connection with her in this cold, isolating new world – it makes every ordeal worth it. He hopes he’d feel the same if they’d stayed on the same timeline.

If he were to spend this Christmas with anyone, it would be her, but she has a whole family to share the holiday with and Steve’s not ready for that: people who know Peggy so intimately and think of him as nothing more than an old war story.

He realizes suddenly that he’s unconsciously wandered to what used to be his and Bucky’s apartment building. It’s been repaired and remodelled so many times in the past seventy years that it’s practically unrecognizable, but Steve knows it too well: he almost died in there more than once. He and Bucky spent the last Christmas before they’d joined the war in that apartment.

Steve sits on the building’s front stoop and looks out at the street that just two years ago he’d walked every day and that now feels all but entirely foreign.

“Merry Christmas, jerk,” he mutters into the darkness.

He doesn’t get a reply.

* * *

 

_1944_

“Bucky!”

Bucky sits up, instantly awake, and has a brief moment of panic when his fingers don’t immediately connect with the comforting metal of his rifle.

Then Steve’s hand on his shoulder squeezes reassuringly and Bucky relaxes enough to finally look at Steve, who’s beaming at him.

“Are you okay?” says Bucky.

“Merry Christmas!” says Steve.

Something heavy drops into Bucky’s stomach. Right, Christmas. That’s why they came back to basecamp last night.

“Already?” he says.

“Already,” says Steve, smile brighter than the goddamn Rockefeller Christmas tree. “You know what this means?”

“It’s the first Christmas you don’t have pneumonia?” says Bucky like the joke it isn’t.

_Merry Christmas, Barnes. Everything you always wished for. Was it worth it?_

Steve’s smile doesn’t even flicker.

“Jerk,” he says fondly. “Twenty-four-hour ceasefire. Temporary reprieve for the holiday.”

_Temporary._ Twenty-four hours. Tomorrow they go back to hell. Merry fucking Christmas.

“So come on, get up,” says Steve, already at the tent flap. “Let’s make the most of it.”

“Steve,” Bucky starts to say, but Steve’s already disappeared outside.

Bucky shimmies out of his sleeping bag, pulls on his coat, and follows. The second he steps outside, icy fire explodes across his right cheek, followed by Steve’s achingly familiar laughter. The thing in Bucky’s stomach gets a little heavier, even as he whips his head to the right and calls out, “You’re gonna pay for that, punk!”

“Don’t worry, Barnes, I’ve got your back!” Morita calls from somewhere past Steve, lobbing a snowball that Steve dodges effortlessly. It doesn’t take long for the other Commandos to ally themselves against Steve, who still wins easily, covering them all in snow while remaining perfectly dry himself, until the fight begins to wane and one of Bucky’s snowballs finally hits him square in the chest.

The other Commandos cheer, clapping Bucky on the back in congratulations, but Bucky just catches Steve’s eye and shakes his head slightly, lips quirked, until Steve throws his head back, entire body shaking with laughter. Then Bucky lets his smile drop, reflecting bitterly that this is just another way their roles have reversed. He couldn’t hit Steve unless Steve let him. The heavy thing in his stomach shifts again.

Steve suddenly straightens, eyes locking onto something behind Bucky.

“Gentlemen.” Agent Carter has appeared from god knows where, trailed by Howard Stark, who’s stumbling slightly as he’s entirely engrossed in making notes on some kind of blueprint, and a private carrying a heavy box.

“Agent Carter,” says Steve. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, Captain,” says Carter, tone somehow simultaneously formal and fond. Her eyes lock with Steve’s in a silent, intimate exchange. Bucky’s insides feel like they’re being eaten alive.

“Gentlemen,” says Stark abruptly, stuffing the blueprint inside his coat, “Agent Carter and I have brought some well-deserved refreshment.”

The private sets down his box and there’s a deafening cheer from the Commandos as they reach for the bottles of Scotch inside.

_We deserve more than whisky,_ Bucky thinks.

Something icy rams into his fingers. Someone is trying to shove a bottle into his hand. He looks up to see Steve smiling at him, eyes warm.

He’s the most beautiful thing Bucky has ever seen –

– and the most terrible.

“Merry Christmas, Buck,” says Steve quietly, and Bucky just wants to cry.

_No it’s not,_ he thinks. _We shouldn’t be here. We weren’t meant for this, you and me. We weren’t._

_You weren’t._

“Merry Christmas, Steve,” he whispers with a smile he thinks might crack in two.


End file.
